I was meh on the Kemba signing based on the age/wear & tear that accompanies the “Isaiah-risk” of the timing of this contract but yeah, when you lose your top choice (if Malcolm was the top choice) you need to fill the gaping hole and we had the space to do it. Of course I didn’t expect Kemba to go Isaiah in Year 1......I was hoping we could get two good years out of him. Hindsight never fails.
So yeah, signing Kemba at that time was the far superior option than sitting on our hands with cap space with Tatum and Jaylen yet to decide their futures.
They weren't sitting on their hands at all. Walker was the secondary target for the LeBronakers, but LA kept him on hold while Kawhi strung them along. In retrospect it would have been better for Boston if LeBron realized that they didn't need Kawhi and gone straight at Walker. Walker came to Boston (rather than New York, who were begging him to go there) because he wanted to compete for a title and his most direct shot left him swinging in the wind while waiting for Kawhi. Boston had more cap space, and could have offered Brogdon more money.
Again.....hindsight on this contract being that awful. Why do you feel it was so simply to acquire Brogdon when his agents were already deeply involved in working with Pritchard and the Bucks?
What the Bucks wanted was irrelevant, the question was were they willing to pay a ginormous tax bill to pay Brogdon's market rate. But everyone knew they weren't, which is why the Pacers made the offer at a level too rich for the Buck's blood. But Boston could have offered more. The Bucks just wanted
something to show for their screwup in not signing Brogdon for four years at the outset. Similar to Pritchard taking back a guy with cancer for Oladipo just so that he has something to show for a player that was leaving anyway (after butchering the Hayward situation).
The clock is ticking on Smart's high value contract. Resigning him at the end of his current deal means that is basically your core still, unless Kemba's salary has been cleared and they are able to bring in a max FA and retain Smart with his Bird rights (I have no idea if this will be cap compliant). The tricky thing is I have no idea how to value the TPE.
I am just rambling but there is a path to a powerhouse here, I'm just not sure how we get there. Smart+ for a star and max out whatever you can for the TPE? Cut a year off Kemba's deal a la the Raef/Ratliff deal? Hold the TPE for a great player or slice it into 2 good/very good players? The summer '22 plan (max FA/retain Marcus)? Some combo of all of the above?
Boston is sort of locked in at this point. They aren't going to get a star for Marcus and skittles. Thanks to that Walker contract what you see is what you're getting. I'm still expecting a Smart extension
if financial planning is possible this offseason (covid19 has
really fucked up the economic forecasts). If not his next deal is going to look very Brogdonesque. And Boston will need to pay it because there's not really an in house replacement there at the moment.
Their only other option is to identify the next Brogdon and sign them next summer using the TPE to facilitate a sign & trade. The Hail Mary play is to hope that Walker shows enough by year's end that the Knicks will take him next summer after they strike out in free agency again.
Couple of things here. First, this assumes that the Bucks would have been willing to take roughly the same package they got from the Pacers from the Celtics. But unless I missed some reporting to the contrary I'm not sure that would be true at all.
The Bucks had only one choice in that situation, pay Brogdon what he was offered or not. That was it. They didn't get to decide where Brogdon played unless it was for them. And thanks to their payroll situation it wasn't an option without a hefty luxury tax bill (and self-inflicted as I noted, they cheaped out on a fourth year for Brogdon when they signed him). Everything else is ex post facto justification and it's wrong.
I'm not saying this from the Brogdon side of the fence, there were posters here that preferred Boston aggressively pursue him as the perfect sidekick to the Jay-Crew, I was not one of them. I was riding a first class car on the Walker train and got covered in as much humble pie as everyone else when it derailed.
I still think that we're overstating the obviousness that 18 months later, we'd have two efficient alpha scorers. It was clear that Tatum might be headed this way, but nobody had that as a given AND Brown at 27/5/4 on 62% TS.
Yeah, everyone reasonable knew that Tatum was bound for MVP contention despite the bump in the road that we now know was Kyzuzu attempting to burn a competitor's clubhouse to the ground for his team (the Nets, as he reached an agreement with them in December of 2018). Despite the hand-wringing over the growing pains, he was still getting better.
Brown's ceiling was the only thing we were questioning. Ben Hogan and HRB have both long been enthusiastically bullish on Brown's ceiling (I'm pretty sure that HRB has said that he thinks JB will be better than Tatum long term, and that's no longer dismissible). I've been more in the cautiously bullish camp where I thought Brown was definitely an all star, but not necessarily an All-NBA player (top 15). I was wrong. He's All-NBA now.
Fwiw, I think that Danny viewed Kemba as karma purge + shot generator + hedge. If the Jays took off, great, we have a good dude on a max deal who won't demand all of the touches. And if either or both plateau, we have a guy who can take the last shot and facilitate for them.
Maybe he should have foreseen short-guy-wheels-falling-off, but as others have noted Kemba was a house before last year. Guy didn't have a history.
I think this is what everyone thought of the signing at the time. Kemba was known as a fantastic clubhouse guy and all star level closer. And that's why Boston targeted him. That's why I certainly loved the deal, it gave Tatum two years to turn in to that closer. A lot of people have been inventing shit to justify the thing after the fact, but why bother? They signed him to a max deal expecting 2-3 years of him at peak value, but the injury bug hit and now they seem to be stuck with a loadstone of a deal. Just please, Danny, for the love of god call the Archdiocese and get an exorcism.
To be fair, it’s only one of the worst contracts because of the injury. A healthy Kemba- the guy we saw for the first 50 or so games in green- would be a very helpful player for this team over the next two years. Its hard for me to kill Ainge for Kemba without knowing how foreseeable the knee degeneration was at the time. Now, giving away a draft pick instead of taking Desmond Bane and his league-leading 3pt% (yeah yeah, sss) or Xavier Tillman (and then using the MLE on a wing instead of Tristan Thompson), I think those are more reasonable to question.
I understood the reason for creating the Kanter TPE (although apparently we were all wrong about him, because his on/off numbers prove that he was an elite defender and we were all too stupid to recognize it), but I was bummed that they passed on Tillman. I liked Bane, too, but I just couldn't see room for two wings with spotty lateral quickness on the roster. I would have been fine with Saddiq Bey and Bane, though.
Yeah man. The Celtics have had some really, really shitty luck on a lot of fronts since the Hayward signing. Losing Kyrie before the 2018 playoffs ...
It's not since the Hayward signing, it's since Danny sold the Celtics' soul to Beelzebub and allowed the franchise to be possessed by the Demon Kyzuzu. And that last was the only bit of good luck that Boston had since.